Letters From Elma's Family

Somewhere in England, January 23, 1944

Dear Folks,

It’s Sunday afternoon again and I’ll try to write this before night. I got three letters from you since I wrote the last time, but haven’t received any airmail letters you’ve written since the 27^th of December. In one of your letters you mentioned the letter I wrote about the money here. It doesn’t make any difference to me what you do with the letters. I don’t have any more bonds coming from the Army. I may have thought so at the time but that is all straightened out now. Have you started receiving the allotments yet? Your V-mail letters are real plain. I don’t have any trouble reading them. We had a good dinner today. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, carrots, bread and jelly and peach pie and coffee. We’ve been getting some good meals now for a while. I was sorry to hear about Mrs. Clark. Hope she is better now. I did get into London last week on my pass. I went into town with the convoy and stayed over night, then got up early and went on to London on the train. Got in there about 8:30, just as it was getting light. I went in with Frank Chinery. We go out together quite a bit. The train station in London is called Paddington. It’s called by name all the time instead of being called Union Station as we would call it. We caught a bus from there and went over to Westminster. Westminster Abbey, House of Commons, House of Lords and a lot of the government offices are right there together. First thing we did was go inside Westminster Abbey and look around. I guess we spent about an hour in there. It’s really a beautiful place. I just can’t describe it to you. I got some post cards that will give you an idea as to what it is like. Even they don’t show it as beautiful as it is to see it. It is decorated with solid gold and when the lights are on it’s really beautiful. It just seems to be made of arches. The building itself is a masterpiece of architecture, especially to be so old. You remember that that is the place they bury all the famous people of England. We couldn’t get into the place where the kings were buried but we were in where the poets and authors were and we took down some of the names. These are some of the names we saw. Kipling, Dickens, Samuel Johnson, William Wordsworth, Shakespeare, William Thackeray, Chaucer, Barton Boothe, William Pitt and David Livingstone. There were a lot more but those are some of the best-known ones. There are plaques and statues all over the place and a lot of the inscriptions are in Latin. I suppose it is Latin anyway. I can’t read it. There is a tomb there for an Unknown Soldier of the World War. I guess it is about like the one we have in Washington DC. When we came out of there, we got a taxi and took one of the regular sightseeing tours. By the way, you should see the taxi’s here. As you know, all the cars here are right hand drive and about two-thirds the size of our cars. The taxi driver’s seat is open on both sides. The back is closed off from the driver by glass with a window that will open part way. There is a regular seat inside and two seats that can be put down that faces the rear. The top can be unfastened and folded down so you can see up and out on all sides. From Westminster Abbey, we drove around that district and saw the House of Parliament and Big Ben up on the tower. We saw the buildings where the Army, Navy and Headquarters are. They are all in nice large buildings. We went past Number 10 Downing Street. The driver took us down Fleet Street. That is where all the newspapers are published. It’s just one newspaper office after another. The newspapers here are sure a lot different from ours and I suppose a lot different from what they were in peacetime. The pages are quite a bit smaller than ours are and most of the papers just have four pages and the most I’ve seen is eight pages. They are put out every day but they don’t have much except war news. The first stop we made after we got into the taxi was at St. Paul’s Cathedral. We were only there about fifteen minutes so about all we had time to do was just walk through. As you can see from the post cards I’m going to send that it has a large dome. There is a whispering gallery way up in the dome. Didn’t have time to go up there but that is one of the places I want to go when I get to London next time. From there you can go outside and look over the city. St. Paul’s Cathedral has been hit by bombs a time or two. Parts of it are fenced off where it was hit and haven’t been repaired. So far it has just been hit on the side and not in the middle. St. Paul’s Cathedral is different in architecture than Westminster Abbey but just as nice. I don’t believe it has quite as much expensive decorations but it is a newer building than Westminster Abbey. They started building St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1675 and completed it in 1710. Took 35 years to build it, but I guess that isn’t so bad for those days. After we left there, the driver drove us around through some of the districts that were hit hardest during the blitz. We saw block after block that was just leveled. Everything had been cleared away and there isn’t anything there now. He showed us some buildings there that he said were just like the ones that were destroyed. They were stone buildings and looked very strong. It sure took a lot to destroy them like they were. A lot of buildings that were hit still have the walls standing but everything inside has been blown up or burned. Most of the buildings over here are built of stone. One reason I suppose is so they will last longer; and another reason is that timber is scarce over here. The driver took us over the London Bridge and showed us part of the town on that side of the river. That isn’t the best section of town but I suppose there are worse sections. The streets all over the city are narrow. Some of them are so narrow there is hardly room for two cars to meet. I guess the buildings were up before they needed wide streets. We came back through a tunnel under the Thames River. From there we went to the Tower Bridge and London Towers. You can see both from the post cards I’ll send. The Tower Bridge will open up to let ships go through. Parts of London Towers have been there for several hundred years. That is where the Kings lived when it was first built. Now it is used as a prison. They kept Hess there for a while after he landed here in Britain. We went from there back up town and that was the end of the tour. It lasted about one and a half hours and cost ten shillings or about two dollars. We went back to the Towers of London and went through it. A guide took us through there and gave us a lot of the history. They showed us some of the prisons and showed us where the executions used to take place. There is an old stone chapel in there built in the twelve hundreds. In one building they have some of the armors that they used to wear. There were some old machine guns there too. Outside they had some old guns where they used stones to shoot. They are really old and don’t look like much now. One of the guns that shot stones has a barrel 25 inches across and was brought from Constantinople. It was used in the 13^th century. We went past the Bank of England where they make all the paper money and past the mints where they make all the coins. They are pretty large places. All the busses over here are double-deckers. That’s to save space I guess. I rode the subways of London several times when I was in there. They call them underground’s instead of subways over here. They aren’t as nice as the ones in New York. Not nearly as fast and won’t take care of nearly as many passengers as the New York subways. When we got into London Saturday morning, there were still fire engines around the Parliament buildings. Some incendiary bombs had fallen there the night before. We could see places in the s